Project J

by Sean Brandywine

  Only then was Tamara aware that she was wearing cubic zirconium earrings that looked like three or four karats worth of diamond sparkling in the sunlight. She felt herself blushing for no reason. Again she nodded to him by way of a bow, and turned to leave.

  He must think I’m terribly wealthy, she thought as she retraced her steps towards the door. Maybe that’s not good, she added. Didn’t he say something about it being easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven?

  Chapter 13: Isa Comes

  “This I cannot believe,” said Abdul Rahman Munif, waving a sheet of paper around.

  “The Catholic Church believes it,” replied Khurram Murad dryly.

  The scene was an office located on the outskirts of Cairo. It looked like a student’s dorm room with books scattered around, newspapers piled in the corner and a laptop computer to go along with pizza boxes and empty cola cans. Both men were in their later twenties, bearded but neatly trimmed, dressed like casual college students. Through an open window came hot, humid air and the sounds of a mass of upraised voices from not far off.

  “Can these American’s actually do this? Bring back Isa lbn Maryam, a Messenger of Allah? Today? With a time machine?”

  “There is a man working in that project who fed the information to a bishop of the Catholic Church. He felt they should know. Our spy in the Vatican intercepted the communiqué and sent it to me. He says that the Church is taking this report seriously.”

  Munif sat down in an old desk chair, keeping the paper in front of him and his eyes upon it. “And what does this Jesus say? What is he telling the Americans?”

  “I do not know.”

  “And what should we do about it? What will happen when this is announced to the world?” Munif shook his head and put the paper down. “No, this must be a fake. A trick of some kind. Jesus? Alive today?”

  Murad reached across the desk to take the sheet of paper. It held only a few lines of computer printout but had shaken these two Muslims badly.

  Murad, always the more religious of the two, said quietly, “Maybe this is the work of Allah. Is it not written: ‘It is definitely close in that time that Isa, Son of Maryam descends amongst you as a just ruler. He will break the cross, kill the swine and abolish jaziya. And money will abound in such access that no one will accept it’?

  “His second coming will be one of the signs of the End of Days. Perhaps that sign is now.”

  Munif stared at Murad, open-mouthed. The room was quiet for a long time, save for the distant murmur of voices raised in protest from the daily demonstration.

  “Allah is merciful,” Munif finally said. “But what if this is not the sign? Not the End of Days? What if this is a trick by these Americans? Then we will have to do something.”

  “What if it is not a trick?” Murad said softly.

  Chapter 14: Background

  “Now that you’ve met our guest and had an evening to think, and, I hope, good night’s sleep, are you ready for some background?” Fielding asked the company head and the DOD auditor who had fallen into something far more than she ever imagined possible. “You are welcome to talk to Dr. Myers and see the video recordings we’ve made of the interviews.”

  “You’ve made videos...?” Tamara asked.

  “Of course. This is history in the flesh. We have almost every word he has spoken on record, along with Dr. Myer’s translations, of course. Well, some of them. He’s busy working with Jesus and hasn’t caught up on all the recordings yet.”

  “I really don’t care about what he says,” Stryker cut in. “But I do care about misuse of company equipment.”

  Juliette smiled, and asked, “What misuse? We simply put the Machine to the use it was intended from the beginning: gathering knowledge.”

  Stryker harrumphed and glared at her.

  “She’s right, you know,” Fielding added in support. “Sooner or later we would have gotten around to retrieving a human from history.”

  “Couldn’t you have grabbed George Washington? Made him tell you if he really did chop down that cherry tree. Or someone else? Someone a little less controversial? Jesus, man, why did you have to grab this man!?” His face turned a strange shade of red as he realized his curse was all too true. “I’m going to have to talk with legal about this. God only knows what I’ll tell the shareholders!”

  “They won’t know for a long time,” Fielding said. “Unless you want to unveil the whole project sometime soon.”

  “You know I can’t do that. The spooks will be all over me. Probably grab the whole project and take it for themselves. We’re lucky they didn’t do that from the start.”

  “Then what have you to worry about?”

  Stryker leaned over the conference table and said strongly, “For one, those same spooks who grab chunks of time on the Machine and never say a word about what they’re doing. We’ve been lucky that they’re so involved in being secret themselves that they haven’t wondered if we might have secrets from them. Can you imagine the cry that will go up when they hear of this?”

  “Then don’t tell them.”

  For a long time, Stryker stood there, leaning on the table and glaring at the scientist. Finally, he stormed out of the room, casting back a, “I’ll let you know my decision.”

  After the door slammed, Juliette asked Fielding, “He wouldn’t shut down Project J, would he?”

  “No. I think that he’ll come around to seeing that this is exactly what the Machine was built for. As you put it, ‘To learn the truth’.”

  “While, I for one, would like very much to learn more about... About Jesus,” Tamara said. “It’s still hard to imagine that really is him I touched yesterday.”

  “I’ve met him many times, and I still can’t get over it,” Juliette commented. “You’re not alone.”

  “Won’t the DOD expect you to be finished soon? And expect a final report on your audit?” Fielding asked.

  “I’ll tell them I’m still looking into matters. They’ll believe me. I pretty much have free rein since I usually get the job done. Besides, I’m telling the truth. I’m just looking deeper into the project.” She smiled as she said it.

  “Well, you’re free to talk to Dr. Myers most any time you want. He is with Jesus every day but not always for long periods. He says that Jesus, although a good orator when he gets going, is prone to being reclusive with periods of intense meditation. We let him have as much privacy as he wishes.”

  Tamara, an investigator used to seeing the big picture, had to ask, “And what are you going to do with him? Eventually, you’ll run out of questions. What then? Send him off to a retired messiahs’ home? Or let him go on the TV talk show circuit, giving personal interviews?”

  “Oh, not that!” Fielding laughed. “I wouldn’t subject anyone to that!” He turned to Juliette and they exchanged looks. “Actually, we’re not sure. I guess you could say that, in the heat of desire to learn if we could do this, we didn’t think that far ahead.”

  “But don’t worry,” Juliette quickly added, “We wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt him. And we always show him the respect he deserves.”

  “How much respect does the Son of God deserve?” Tamara could not help herself from asking.

  “Ah... About that,” Fielding began, “so far, we’ve found him simply to be a man. There has been no turning water into wine, no raising the dead, nothing more than a normal man could do.”

  Juliette added, “We have a religious member of the team, Dr. Hans Buerer. He’s Catholic and was concerned about this project from the beginning.”

  “Actually, he wanted us to not go through with it,” Fielding said, “kind of like Dr. Stryker, he said we should try it on some other human in history. In fact, he suggested a totally unimportant person, a nobody.”

  “But that would gain us little in the way of historical knowledge,” Juliette said. “Oh, we might get some knowledge about the period we grabbed the person from, but nothing like we’re ge
tting now! It’s hard to get anything out of him, but Seymour has gotten him to open up on occasion and we’ve learned so much! Did you know that Jesus was married? And he had two children!”

  “Wasn’t there a movie about that a while back?” Tamara asked.

  “And we found out where he was during those missing years,” she continued without answering the movie question. “You know, the time between his early teenage years and when he began his real ministry at about thirty years of age.”

  “Juliette, let her learn from Dr. Myers.” Turning to Tamara, Fielding said, “You’ll find the recordings fascinating. But, by all means, talk with Dr. Myers.”

  “I’m sure I will. That has always been a fascinating period in history for me.”

  “Then enjoy!” he said. On a less enthusiastic note, he added, “We’ll talk again about this.”

  As the meeting broke up, Juliette showed Tamara where Dr. Myers’ office was. The man was in, and seemed genuinely happy to see the auditor.

  “Please come in, come in. Have a seat.”

  His office, like so many of the scientists, was filled with books, but his desk was very neat, holding only a computer terminal on one corner and a pad of paper before him. Tamara noted that he wrote with a gold fountain pen, a very archaic touch but one that she liked. She had a great-grandfather who used fountain pens and had one almost exactly like that.

  After the usual pleasantries, she got right to the point. “Dr. Stryker has given me permission to learn all I can about your Project J – which, I assume, stands for Jesus?”

  “It does,” he agreed. “But I’ll wager that you applied some pressure on him to gain this privilege.”

  She laughed. “True. I had to threaten him with the report I’m supposed to write. He certainly does not seem happy with Project J.”

  “No, he’s not. But he’ll get over that. Dr. Fielding says that he’s a grump but will come to realize the tremendous value of this project. And the tremendous publicity it will mean for Chronodyne. He’s mostly unhappy that the target was chosen without his consultation.”

  “Target? Is that how you refer to Jesus Christ? A target?”

  “A technical term only.” Myers set the gold pen on the pad and pushed both a little way from him. “I am extremely happy that I was chosen to participate in this project. Can you imagine what it means to a scholar who has studied Biblical times and people all his life, especially this man, to be able to talk to him, to ask questions?”

  “Yes, I think I can. When I was in college, I was interested in that period. And, to be honest, in the Jesus story. I read many books about it. Even took a class in Biblical History. There are so many interpretations of his life, so many ways of looking at him. Some truly believe he was the only Son of God. Others that he was only a man. Some say he was a political rebel who wanted to overthrow the Roman occupation, others that he was simply a rabbi teaching his beliefs. It is a fascinating story. I wanted to find out the truth for myself.”

  “And did you?”

  “Of course not! There are so many unanswered questions, so hard to know what to believe! I sometimes felt that I could almost grasp a feeling for what had happened two thousand years ago. Then I would read another book and what I thought I understood came into question. But the truth? No. I could find nothing I could point to and label it the truth.”

  Myers smile faintly. “As so many others have found, there are no easy answers. Until now...”

  “Do you believe that this is really Jesus Christ, Doctor?”

  “Please, call me Seymour. Or even Sy, if you wish, although the only person who called me that was my wife.

  “And the answer is yes. I believe this man has the exact memories of the man who walked this earth two thousand years ago.”

  Tamara leaned forward to ask earnestly, “Then what was he?”

  “That, my dear, is a little hard to answer. I can tell you this: he believed that he was chosen by God to prepare his people for the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God on this earth. In that sense, he was definitely what we would call an Apocalyptic Jew. He was a Jew first and foremost, and never intended to be otherwise. In addition, as did many of the Jews of his time, he firmly believed with all his heart and mind that very soon there would be the coming of the Kingdom of God to this earth, and that the power of God would bring justice and peace to a world ravaged by injustice and oppression. And that this Kingdom would be signaled by the arrival of the ‘Son of Man’, a Messiah. The literal translation of the Hebrew word moshiach is ‘anointed’, which refers to the ritual of consecrating someone by anointing his head with oil. This Messiah would be the man designated by God as an agent for his imminent apocalyptic judgment on an evil world.”

  He paused and pursed his lips. “Perhaps a little more background, my dear.

  “At that time, the Jewish people were under the rule of the Roman Empire. It was not an overly harsh rule, for the Romans were willing to let the Jews believe as they wished and run their own affairs, so long as they paid taxes to Rome and allowed the Romans pretty much free rein. The Roman soldiers could, and did, conscript Jews to work on roads and other projects without pay. But to the Jewish people, with their long history of oppression, this was not acceptable. This was their land, given to them by a covenant with God. They wanted very much to kick the Romans out but lacked the military strength to do it. This was proven in 70 BCE when an open revolt was smashed, the Temple destroyed and thousands of Jews killed. And in other revolts before that big one.

  “It was a common belief, and had been for a long time, that God would come to Earth, overthrow the oppressors and restore the Jews to their rightful place. There were even some who believed that in this apocalyptic vision the Jewish people would rule the entire world.

  “You should understand that this was the world Jesus was born into. His people were under what they considered a harsh foreign rule; the times were rough and violent, with people often barely eking out an existence. Add to that mix the fact that these were a highly religious people whose worldview did not separate reality from religion. Theirs was a hard world dominated by a dissatisfaction that often spilled over into rebellion.

  “Jesus, from the beginning of his life, was taught obedience to God in all things and that God would come to save his chosen people. The Hebrew bible contained many passages that proclaim such, even describing the one who would come to initiate God’s Kingdom.

  “Am I telling you that which you already know?” he paused to ask.

  “Pretty much. That is the picture I had gotten from my readings.”

  “Well, then, back to your original question.

  “From an early age, Jesus was different. He was and is an intelligent person. Very probably irritated his elders with questions that were hard to answer – you know the type. He was also on the quiet, shy side. To understand why, you have to understand the circumstances of his birth.

  “First off, to correct a common misconception. Jesus was not born of a virgin. In the first place, the use of the term virgin in the Bible is incorrect. The Greek word ‘parthenos’ means ‘maiden’ not virgin. It was translated into ‘virgin’ by those who rewrote the gospels, to imply that Jesus had a miraculous birth rather than the old, common method. Second, Jesus himself told me that his mother, Miriam in Aramaic, had told him that she was not a virgin and that Yosef (aka Joseph) was, indeed, his father.

  “As a side note, he also told me that he had an older brother by his father with a prior wife, Leah, and three younger brothers and two sisters by Mary. The oldest was James. After Jesus came Jose. The next younger brothers were Judas and Simon. The sisters were Rachel and Tamar. The last one, Simon, was born of Mary by another husband after the original Joseph died. Jesus never got along with this stepfather. In fact, he won’t even tell me his name.

  “Oh, I see by your expression that I’m boring you with that which you already know.”

  Tamara protested, “I had heard some of that, but it is intere
sting that you heard it from his own lips. And this bit about a stepfather is new.” She paused for a second. “Say, the Bible doesn’t name his sisters, does it?”

  “No. But Jesus liked them and told me their names. Tamar, by the way, is the root of your name. It was also one of the daughters of King David.

  “Well, Joseph and Mary were betrothed to marry after his first wife died. He had a young son and wanted to remarry for that reason, if no other. And, yes, he was considerably older than Mary. However, as is often the case, they got a little carried away, and when the time for the marriage approached it was obvious that she was with child. She was, as near as I can calculate, only fourteen or so at the time. Not really that unusual in those days. I never asked Jesus how old his father was. Joseph died when Jesus was eleven.